


a thousand words

by crossingwinter



Series: smutty sequels because i have no self control [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, ‘‘I tried to make this naughty but I just made it emo’’ a novel by me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 21:50:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20785592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: In which, some years later, Ben encounters someone he drew for nudes.





	a thousand words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [monsterleadmehome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterleadmehome/gifts).

> HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY ALANNAH <3

“Excuse me.” 

The voice is soft, and a little hard to hear. The room isn’t quiet. The gallery owner had decided that playing loud alt-pop would perhaps convince people that he was running a nightclub and not an art gallery, and therefore people might come in, avail themselves of the alcohol, and drunkenly buy a painting or two.

Ben finds it more than a little annoying. And definitely not the genre he’d have chosen.

He turns and finds himself—

Frozen.

Everything freezes around him, the music, the sounds of people chatting with one another, the air in his lungs.

He’d spent too much time staring at that photograph she’d sent him via Instagram DMs five years before. Her eyes—a little bright—the shape of her breasts as she took a topless selfie in desperation, the shade of her lips, the shadows that her desktop lamp cast across her skin.

And now she’s here—fully clothed—at his art opening.

She’s still talking but he can’t hear the words coming out of his mouth because—

“It’s you.”

She flushes and shifts from one foot to the other.

“Yes, I guess you do remember.”

He tries to find a subtle way to pinch himself, to check if he’s dreaming.

He’s not.

“Ben,” he says, holding a hand out.

“Rey,” she replies.  _ reyjay.  _ Her Instagram had disappeared two months after he’d drawn that portrait of her. He’d tried to find the DM but it looked like she’d fully deleted her account. And the email he’d sent the HQ drawing to was, in fact, a school email, and even for him, it felt a little creepy to dig around and see if he could find her on the school directory.

But here she is.

“How’d you…” he asks slowly.

“I saw the event on your Facebook page,” she says, smiling almost shyly.

“You follow my Facebook page?” It’s the dumbest possible question he could possibly be asking, but here he is, asking it anyway. 

She nods, a shy smile creeping across her face. “Yeah.”

He’d never thought to check there. Never once. Because if she’d deleted her Insta, surely she wouldn’t be on Facebook. Haven’t The Youth given up on Facebook or something? 

He doesn’t know what to say next. To be fair, he’s not frequently articulate. Indeed, he’s been told multiple times that, as far as conversationalists go, he’s rude, snarky, aggressive, and, on one horrific failure of a date, “too elitist to be allowed to open his mouth.”

He doesn’t want to be too elitist to open his mouth right now.

Because Rey is here, and she’s fucking breathtaking.

There’s a slight curl to her hair as it is coming loose from her ponytail, her eyes are the same warm hazel he’d seen in the picture all those years ago. She’s a little less thin, looks like either her metabolism has slowed down as it does once you stop being a teenager or just that she’s eating more. It suits her. 

“What are you up to these days?” he asks her, because he’s just been standing there staring and sure, he’s a terrible conversationalist, but he knows that you can’t just stand there staring at someone for too long before it gets awkward. (Awkward—another thing he’s been told he is in conversation with others.)

“Getting my Masters’ now,” she says. “In a few weeks, actually. Then off to the real world.”

“Still in engineering?” he asks.

She pinkens slightly. “Aeronautical.” 

“Damn,” he grins. “And here I never graduated from college.”

“Yeah, but you did well for yourself,” she says, looking around. Her eyes settle on a painting. Ben had once called it  _ watered down impressionism _ as a joke. Easier to call it that than to try and admit to himself that he’d actually wanted to try a style that hadn’t worked in the end. But Rey’s looking at it like it’s actually something good. 

“I love the colors in this one,” she tells him, taking a step towards it. “The blue really makes the red pop.” Ben smiles. It’s the saving grace of the painting, he thinks, but doesn’t say. It feels good to have Rey praise him. “But you always did have a way with color, didn’t you?” she says with a sigh. 

The words slip out of him before he can stop them. “Did you end up passing the class, then?”

She turns to look at him sharply, and her flush gets a little deeper. “Yeah,” she says. “Scraped a C which was all I needed. My professor was very complimentary of my final piece.” She pulls a face. “I meant to tell you, but things got tricky right as the end of the semester rolled around and I ended up deleting my Instagram and then I wasn’t sure if you’d remember me without it.” Her eyes are bright and she looks down at her hands and Ben frowns.

“I don’t know how many artists you bribe with nudes to cheat your final for you, but you’re kind of unforgettable even without that.”

She looks at him, and there it is again, that shy smile peeking through the clouded expression on her face. “Yeah?”

Ben takes her hand and he’s meaning to drag her across the gallery. He’s meaning to bring her to the painting called “Cat’s Eye” but something happens when he touches her hand. 

He feels warm, and light, and it’s not like shaking hands with potential patrons, or the gallery owner, or anyone else at this fucking opening. He’s suddenly very aware of how hard his heart is beating in his chest, how violently it’s pounding against his ribcage as though it wants nothing more— _ nothing _ more—than to leap out of his body and...and something with her heart.

He swallows.

His mouth went dry.

Her eyes are so bright right now, and a single solitary tear drops down her cheek. Without even being aware of it, he reaches up and cups her chin, his thumb swiping the tear away. Her lips part in a quiet  _ oh _ , and his heart is in his throat, in his ears, in his hand that’s holding hers.

He was going to do something. He was going to say something. Something about her eyes. They’re unforgettable, her eyes. So fucking bright. And there’s more tears welling in them now and he can’t have that. He really can’t.

“It’s ok,” he tells her gently and she inhales sharply. She tries to smile again and his lips drop down to hers.

They have the same curve they did when he drew them. They’re soft and wide and trembling as she tries to keep herself from crying. Why is she crying?

She hasn’t let go of his hand. She hasn’t pushed him away. If anything she has taken a hesitant step towards him and he doesn’t know what’s happening at all, he just knows that he’s here with reyjay and he’s holding her hand.

Cat’s Eye. 

That’s what he was going to do.

“Come with me,” he tells her, and he pulls her across the gallery the way he’d meant to before. She follows him and stops short when he pauses in front of the painting. “Do you know how lovely your eyes are?” he asks her quietly.

Rey is staring at the painting, the stripes of brown and green emanating in a circle from a dark center. It’s not a picture of a cat’s eye, but he couldn’t very well have named it reyjay’s eye. Especially if she had deleted her Instagram.

She stares at it. She keeps breathing in and out. Her lips are still parted; her hand is still in his.

And when she turns to look at him, the tears are gone.

There’s a fire there now.

-

_ I’d never felt so alone,  _ she told him as they walked through the gallery together. College had been hard. She had friends, but they were in different programs and none of the kids in hers had been good to her. How isolating it had been, continuing to crack away at an engineering degree by herself without anyone to help her with P-Sets and professors who were just terrible at teaching the material. Her Instagram was gone because social media made it all worse, had sent her into spirals of worthlessness that had almost made her drop out of school.

That had resonated. That had resonated a lot. And Ben told her about how he hated the art major, hated the art majors, but loved the art. How no matter what he tried he kept failing even though he thought his stuff was good—but not good enough for his teachers. How he didn’t really have friends in college (hard at the time), how he didn’t really have friends now (he’s used to it now), but drawing always made him feel better. Made him feel like he mattered.  _ You’re not alone. _

_ Neither are you,  _ she’d replied, and had she seen his loneliness in all of his paintings? Sometimes he sees it there himself but pretends not to. It hurts too much to admit that he’s lonely. It makes him feel like he’s weak to admit he’s lonely. 

With Rey he stops feeling lonely though.

Somehow there’s no desperate need to impress her—he’d done that years ago. He’d done that enough that she’d asked him to draw her topless for her art final.

And maybe that’s why, even though the opening is drawing to a close, he’s unwilling to let her go. Because sure, he can look her up among his Facebook followers, but he knows that there’s something fleeting in the digital. She can disappear again, like a ghost or a spirit or a piece of his own damn imagination and all he’ll be left with is the memory of her eyes and lips and more paintings that’ll never quite capture what she means to him.

Which is how he ends up saying, “Want to go somewhere? Coffee, or…”

“Can I see your studio?” she asks him. Gone is the shyness. She doesn’t flush anymore. She questions point blank and sometimes—still, again, never enough—takes his hand.

“Yeah, sure,” he says with a smile and off they go, into the night.

-

“Paint me like one of your french girls?” she jokes, those cat’s eyes of hers twinkling as she sees the beaten-up paint-splattered sofa in the corner.

Except it isn’t a joke.

She’s stripping her t-shirt up over her head and there they are again—her breasts. They’re fuller now, like the rest of her, and her nipples seem rosier, but maybe that’s just the lighting. She shucks off her pants and there’s a lovely thatch of dark hair between her legs that he just wants to press his face into. But he doesn’t. 

She’s all confidence now. Whether or not it had been confidence or desperation that had led her to send him pictures over Instagram to begin with, he doesn’t know. He just knows that where she’d been shy and hesitant before, she’s not now as she settles into the cushions he’s napped on how many times and watches him, clearly expecting him to mix his paints.

He doesn’t. 

Because if she’s all confidence now, so is he. She’d taken off her clothes, she’d sent him those pictures, she’s here now, she’d sought him out again and again. She’d told him he wasn’t alone either. And she’s here now, looking at him with those burning-bright eyes of hers.

So what else is he supposed to do except cross to the couch and run his nose against the line of her jaw until his lips find hers? Her hands climb along his spine from his hips to the line of his hair at the top of his neck. She sucks on his lower lip as he fumbles with the buttons of his shirt because he wants to feel her chest against his. Wants to feel every inch of her.

“I’ll paint you,” he murmurs into her mouth. “I’ll paint you with my cum dripping out of you, with your skin all flushed and sweaty. I’ll paint you a hundred times.”

“You’d better,” she replies and her hands drop from his head to his belt, tugging the fastening loose and finding his fly. “You’d fucking better.”

He’s in her like breathing, like being alive for the first time. She’s warm, and soft, and she grips him just enough for all thoughts beyond her to leave his head. And when he looks down at her, she’s like a painting, her lips parted like that, her eyes bright, her cheeks pink. Except, unlike a painting, she doesn’t let him look at her long before she surges up to kiss him again, before her hands clutch as his back, at his hips, urging him into her. Unlike a painting, she brings him in, she murmurs incoherent, unconnected, intermittent  _ Ben _ s and  _ I _ s and  _ please _ s and  _ more _ s.

And his hips are pistoning into her. Nothing exists beyond the two of them, nothing has ever existed beyond the two of them. Who was he before he met her? Some fuck up? And now he’s found her again, a muse, a blessing, who holds him close and lets him believe that maybe things can, in fact, be fated for the better.

She’s perfect. She’s more beautiful than any painting could be. And he feels like he could go for hours like this, just lost in her. Lost, yet also somehow found.

He doesn’t paint her with his cum dripping out of her—not this time, anyway.

This time, he slides to the floor and licks her clean, tasting the two of them together until she’s shuddering and sighing and arching against the couch, the sounds of her echoing through the studio until she’s spent. 

He leans his forehead against her thigh for a moment before looking up at her.

Her eyelids are already fluttering closed and she is sinking into the cushions, warm and happy. How beautiful she is, with all the tension she held in her fucked right out of her. Her skin is flushed, her hair is wild, and her face has eased itself into the slightest of slight smiles.

He kisses her thigh and tugs his pants back up his hips. Then he gets to his feet and pads over to his canvases.

“Come back,” Rey murmurs to him and he smiles.

“I will,” he replies quietly. “I’m still here. I promised to paint you like one of my French girls.”

And he does.

**Author's Note:**

> [here i am!](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)


End file.
